by Kat Cantrell
Ms. Corbin had a touch of pit bull, which Val appreciated in someone paid to help him succeed. And maybe in a woman he was planning to get naked eventually too. Jury was still out on that one.
All at once, a fair bit of curiosity surfaced about her goal for this gig. “Are you hoping I’ll share?”
“Not on my radar. Winning is.”
And that told him enough to know that he liked her on his side, not his brother’s. If winning was what turned her on, then he was game. He had something to prove to everyone, even if one of the people who most deserved to eat crow was dead. “Great. Where do we start?”
The look she slid over the length of his torso put a little fire in his belly, a total paradox given the chill still weighing down the air. Even that was more of a turn-on than it should have been, and he was sorry the desk was in the way of her line of sight. He’d be happy to let her stare at him if she wanted to.
“For one, you need a makeover,” she announced with zero fanfare.
Speaking of things not being on the radar... He glanced at his untucked button-down, sleeves rolled up the forearms. Which was comfortable and necessary attire when transferring boxes of macaroni and cheese from the stock room to the kitchen. “What’s wrong with the current me?”
“Dress the part,” she advised, “and you’re halfway there. Act the part and you’re at ninety.”
That sounded suspiciously like business-school rhetoric, something he could do without. Val had never faked anything in his life. “What’s the other ten percent?”
“Show up.”
“Got that locked. I work hard.” He sat back in his chair—Xavier’s chair. LeBlanc Jewelers would never feel like home, and he didn’t intend for it to. “But I play harder. Have dinner with me tonight and find out which one I’m better at showing up for.”
Two
There was something fundamentally wrong with Sabrina because a yes had formed on her tongue before she could catch it. Fortunately, she didn’t actually say it. “We’re working together, Mr. LeBlanc. We may eat within shouting distance of each other at some point during our association because food is a necessary part of survival, but it will not be a date, and there will be no playing.”
She kept her face composed through sheer force of will and years of practice. Men of his ilk didn’t take a woman seriously unless she had an iron backbone and an immunity to all forms of flirting. Sabrina had both. Valentino LeBlanc had started testing out her weaknesses sooner than she’d expected, but she’d get through to him. Eventually.
Lazily, he spun his chair as he contemplated her, his dark blue eyes a startling warm contrast to Xavier’s. She only vaguely recalled meeting Val a few months ago, and before she’d walked into the CEO’s office, she’d have said he was the boring brother, the one everyone forgot about.
She’d have been wrong. Shocking, uncomfortable awareness of him had ambushed her from the first.
Because Val was now sitting behind the desk? It was no secret that she’d always been attracted to powerful men. Xavier had checked all her boxes. He was a good-looking man who commanded people’s respect by virtue of his presence alone. You could tell he helmed a vast corporation the moment you looked at him. Authoritative and decisive, he ate weaker people for breakfast, and he was perfect for someone who liked her men unemotional.
Emotions ruined everything, especially when they were hers.
Xavier was exactly her type: a man who could provide plus-one services, interesting conversation, and the occasional sleepover without either one getting the wrong idea. Though she hadn’t gotten that far with Xavier. Instead, she’d lost interest in him almost immediately. Case in point: the moment he’d walked out of the CEO’s office a few minutes ago, she’d forgotten about him.
Valentino LeBlanc checked none of her boxes. Sensuality wafted from him in a long wave that caught her in places it shouldn’t. His hair was too long, his lips too full and his eyes—they had a depth that she’d have never considered attractive. Vulnerability was for losers. But he carried himself in a way that promised there was more to him than the ability to feel things.
Val tilted his chin, and long, inky strands of hair fell against his cheeks. Her fingers itched to sweep it away.
“And you should get a haircut,” she told him decisively. Back on track. Finally.
“Eating is more than a basic need, by the way,” he said, deliberately not letting her change the subject. “I know a lot about food. How it can control you. How the lack of it can cause you to do things you’d never contemplate under normal circumstances. But, in the right scenario, it can become a form of expression. Art. Let me cook for you.”
Oh, not a chance. He was likely a savant in the kitchen, turning spaghetti sauce into a seduction and, next thing she knew, he’d boost her to the counter, thighs spread and dinner forgotten as he made love to her.
That did not sound appealing in the slightest. It didn’t. Except for maybe the spaghetti sauce, the seduction and the part where a man would be between her legs. She sighed. It had been too long since she’d had a date. Clearly. But, even so, she’d never been a sex-on-the-counter type. It was too...passionate.
She worked hard not to inspire that kind of abandon in a man. Hell, she didn’t even know if that was in her own makeup, nor did she want to find out.
“I’m here to do a job, Mr. LeBlanc.”
She needed clients, not a man she’d have to shed sooner rather than later. They all cheated eventually, and she enjoyed men enough to date them but not to hang around for the eventual evisceration. Her father should have been enough of a warning, with his multiple affairs that had hurt her mother over and over. She scarcely spoke to her father anymore and she was still too mad at her mother for putting up with it to have much of a relationship with her either.
And then her ex, John...well, he was a man, wasn’t he? Suffice to say she wasn’t repeating that mistake.
“Food is my job,” he told her and waved a hand to encompass the whole of the office. “This is temporary. A speed bump on the way to my inheritance.”
“Which you will not get if we don’t shift things into your favor,” she reminded him and stood. “Perhaps we should take a tour of the company. Learn some people’s names.”
Get out of this office, where it’s far too easy to imagine non-work-related things happening.
He didn’t move. “I know where accounting is and how to find the bathroom. So I’m good. If we’re going to work together, I should probably know more things about you, not LeBlanc Jewelers. I can read a shareholder report later.”
Fair enough. And she’d practiced her intro enough times to do it while half-asleep. “I’ve been an executive coach for five years, and I worked as a corporate trainer for a Fortune 500 company before that. I’ve worked with the CEO of Evermore and the CFO of DGM Enterprises. I like to knit, and my uncle collects antique cars, so sometimes I go to shows with him on weekends.”
“That’s funny. That’s exactly what the bio on your website says.” Val’s smile had a tinge of smirk in it. Too much of one. “Curious. Did you stick knitting in there because it’s in vogue?”
What was he implying, that she only put that in her bio to make her seem like less of a workaholic? If so, how the hell had he figured that out so quickly? No one had ever questioned that before.
“I can knit. I like to knit.” When she remembered where she’d put her needles. And to buy yarn. Neither of which had happened in about five years.
“No one likes to knit. Knitting is something grandmas do because they can’t handle much excitement. I think you can. And you should.”
That was not a test she had any intention of passing. “I’m sensing that you are not in the frame of mind to start with our coaching sessions today. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
She spun to go find her sanity, but Val beat her to the door. Someho
w. It had been a mistake to try to leave, obviously. He leaned on the door in front of her, holding it shut with his body. Forcing her to acknowledge that he had one. The scent of male permeated everything, digging into her marrow.
Suddenly, she could think of nothing but how close he was, how easily she could reach out and touch him. Her skin tingled as his gaze swept her with an almost physical weight, and the awareness she’d been fighting dropped over them both like a heavy cloak.
What was wrong with her that she couldn’t get her brain out of the gutter?
He was a sexy man, no doubt. But not so different from a hundred other men within a stone’s throw, right down to the womanizing bent of his rhetoric. Normally it was easy to keep her distance. Men got the message pretty fast when she froze them out, but she was having the hardest time making ice around a man with so much natural heat.
“Leaving so soon?” he drawled. “We’ve got six months. I’d like to make the most of them. Please stay.”
She crossed her arms over her racing heart, trying to pretend it was because he’d blocked the door and thus her exit. Not because he excited her. He didn’t. Or rather he shouldn’t, which wasn’t the same at all, sadly. “I’m willing to stay if you’ll start taking my skills seriously.”
“I take every inch of you seriously.”
How he managed to turn that into something that sounded like a promise of the carnal variety she’d never know. Probably it was a testament to her state of mind, not his. A guy like Val flirted without conscious thought, almost as a reflex. Woman equaled conquest in his world, so the better course of action would be to ignore his innuendos, get him on a professional footing with her and go on.
“Great,” she said smoothly and wiped her clammy hands as surreptitiously as she could on her skirt. “Then let’s get serious. If you don’t want to take a tour of the building, where would you like to start?”
His gaze drifted along her face to land on her lips, lingering there with such intensity that she felt it way down low in her core, the same way she might if he’d actually traced her mouth with his fingertip. It was ridiculous. Phantom caresses were not on the agenda.
“How do you usually start with clients?” he asked.
Good. Okay. He was in the realm of appropriate work-related conversation. She was the one veering off into things she had no business imagining, like what it would feel like to be kissed by a man who knew his way around a woman. Val did, she could tell.
Sabrina cleared her throat. “Where do you feel your deficiencies are?”
His brows raised. “Who says I have any?”
Ugh. That hadn’t been so smoothly done. Might as well announce that he’d thrown her off-kilter. “What I meant was...you hired me for a reason. You clearly think you have some areas needing improvement. What is the number one thing that you’d like to be different in one month?”
The wicked smile that tore through his expression did not bode well. “I’d like to say that you’d unbend enough to have dinner with me. But I assume you meant related to my position as temporary CEO of LeBlanc. Then I would say I’d like to have command of how the staff expects decisions to be made. In the nonprofit world, we do it as a team. I’m the tie breaker. Is that how it works here?”
“But that’s easy, Val,” she said without thinking. Without even consciously realizing that she’d switched to calling him Val in her head. She rushed on before he could comment or she could stumble over it. “You make the decisions, period, end of story. The rest of the staff doesn’t get a say. That’s the beauty of the corporate world.”
“That doesn’t sound beautiful at all,” Val muttered. “It sounds like a recipe for getting it wrong.”
Speechless, she stared at him, grappling for the right words to explain that, in the corporate world, it was expected that the CEO be domineering and opinionated. But maybe it didn’t have to be that way for Val, not in this case since he was only temporarily the CEO. Xavier was domineering enough for both of them, and he’d be back in the saddle throwing his weight around soon enough.
“I’m not sure how to advise you, then,” she said cautiously. “But we’ll get there.”
She’d only worked with a handful of CEOs, which was part of the reason she’d accepted Val as a client. More executive clients on her résumé could never be a bad thing and, as she’d told him, there was no backup income if she didn’t have a continual stream of customers.
“How will we get there?”
“Together,” she promised with only slightly more confidence than she felt. “I’ve never failed to deliver on a client’s expectations. I’ll work up a plan for the next few weeks, and we can go over that tomorrow.”
“So, essentially you’re saying that the one thing I’m unsure about is something you can’t advise me on. But you’ll have a plan put together tomorrow.” His gaze burned into her, scoring her insides with his particular brand. “Not today.”
Something inside snapped. “What are you implying? That I might not be good at what I do because I haven’t got a list of trite strategies to hand you? My coaching is personalized to each client. I have to evaluate where you are in relation to the corporate culture. That takes more than five minutes.”
“Then, I’m making your job harder by refusing to engage with the rest of the team,” he surmised quietly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
She blinked. Had he just apologized because he hadn’t taken her suggestion to tour the building? “You shouldn’t apologize. Ever.”
His brief smile shouldn’t have smacked her as hard as it did. She hadn’t expected to like Valentino LeBlanc. What was she supposed to do with that?
“Because you’re the forgiving sort?”
“No, because they’re going to eat you alive, Val.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose to cover the swirl that had started up in her stomach, a merry-go-round of confusion and awareness and sheer terror. What had she signed up for with this gig? LeBlanc was poised to become a billion-dollar-a-year company. It needed Xavier, not a man who seemed better suited to be drinking wine at an outdoor trattoria in Venice with a lush Italian film star.
Deep breath. He was paying her to fix that. Quite well.
Val needed her. More than she’d ever have assumed. Executive material he was not, and the odds were stacked against him almost unfairly. It dug under her skin in a wholly different way than the erotic promise that dripped from his pores. The sensual vibe that wound between them needed to go, or she was going to botch this. She couldn’t. Consulting was going to get her to the next level. Specifically, having a nameplate on the door with her name and the title CEO stamped on it. The more she gleaned from experiences with her clients, the easier that would be.
Except Val was watching her with those bedroom eyes that said he was imagining her naked and liked it a whole lot. Men generally weren’t allowed to look at her like that. She shouldn’t let him do it either but, just as she was about to say so, he tilted his head and she got distracted by the way his midnight-colored hair fell into his eyes.
“You don’t think I can do this, do you?” he murmured without a shred of guile. He was genuinely asking.
She nearly groaned. Boy, she had really inspired his confidence, hadn’t she? “I do. I have absolute faith in you. And myself. The problem is...”
Brain-dead all at once, she scouted around for a plausible reason why she’d bobbled their interaction thus far that didn’t sound like he’d come on to her inappropriately when, in reality, he’d mentioned dinner one time. She’d shot him down, he’d ruefully suggested it would be nice if she’d reconsider and they’d moved on. He’d moved on. She was the one stuck on how to haul the frosty distance back between them, an atmosphere that she usually created so easily.
“The problem is,” she repeated, “that I haven’t properly assessed your strengths.”
Yes. That was exactly it. Brain engaged! If they focused on his strengths first instead of the areas for improvement, there’d be less opportunity for her to stick her foot in her mouth again. And it would help her get a handle on him professionally.
“That’s not true.” A smile climbed across his face, and it was fascinating to watch it take over his whole body. What kind of man smiled with every fiber of his being? “You know I can cook.”
Okay. If that’s what he was giving her to work with, fine. “Then tell me how you can use that to succeed here.”
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me?”
She shook her head. “That’s not how coaching works. Does the coach pull the quarterback off the field and start throwing the passes himself? No. He guides the player according to his knowledge of strategy, honing it to the specific needs of that athlete. That’s what I do.”
“Sounds like I’m expected to do all the work,” he suggested with a wink that should have been smarmy. It wasn’t.
He was far more charming than she’d ever admit. “There’s absolutely no question about that, Mr. LeBlanc. You have a very long battle ahead of you, especially given that you’ve had no exposure to the corporate world. Most men in your position have had years to become...”
“Hard?” he supplied handily. “And I liked it better when you called me Val.”
Brittle was the word that had sprung to mind. But from where, she had no idea. CEOs were resilient, resourceful and, above all, in charge. “To become acclimated. It’s a different world than the one you’re probably used to.”
At that point, he crossed his arms, and it was as telling a gesture as anything he’d done thus far. “What do you think I’m used to?”
The defensive posture put her on edge. She was stumbling again, with few handrails to grasp. He wasn’t a typical client who wanted to leapfrog over the men ahead of him in line to the corner office and had hired her to give him an edge. Val was clearly sensitive, with land mines and trip wires in odd places. Things she had little experience with.